September 25, 2018

Horse 2469 - Savage Strawberries and 'Tater Terrorism

As an Australian Australian who lives in Australia, I am pretty used to living in country where everything is actively trying to kill you.
Where I live in Western Sydney, we have the Sydney Funnel Web Spider which has a neurotoxin that will kill you, we have the Redback spider which hangs out in people's toilets, under stairs and in garages, which will also kill you; and we have Brown Snakes in Sydney which are also trying to kill you.
In Western Australia the town of Wittenoom had to be abandoned because the blue asbestos which they were mining out of the ground was trying to kill people, we have sharks and crocodiles that will try to kill you, we have kangaroos and emus which are idiots and have no idea about road sense and so will jump out in front of your car, which will kill you, and we have the wombat which has a muscley cartilaginous bum which if they trap your head between it and a hard object, it will kill you.
We have snakes, spiders, animals, murder birds like the emu and cassowary, and even the very dirt itself, all trying to kill you and as such Australians are all hard as nails.

But now there is a new terror in Australia; a terror so hideous, so heinous, so incredibly dastardly that I am at pains to even mention it. It is so unbelievable that if it hadn't made its way all over the newspapers and televisions of this wide brown land, nobody would have believed it. I am of course talking about... fruit.
Sometime last week, someone found a needle in a strawberry at a supermarket and someone else found a needle in an apple. Admittedly this is probably just an isolated incident where either a disgruntled employee wanted to get back at their old employer, or maybe some teenage brat thought that this was funny because teenagers don't have fully developed brains but it could be something more sinister.

What happens if this is terrorism?
Where does this end? Are we now going to find knives in our apples? Do we have to worry about Queenslanders and watch out for sawnoff shotguns in our bananas? How about samurai swords and katanas in satsumas? I think that you could just about hide a Husqvarna chainsaw inside a pumpkin. I hear that that fruit fly exclusion zone as you head into Victoria is actually because they are still worried about war breaking out between the states and explosive devices being smuggled in, hidden in cherries. I wouldn't be surprised if we lost the Emu War in the 1930s because they'd been stockpiling three-ohs and disguising them in cucumbers. Cassowaries have been hiding out in the cane fields with maxim guns and have been filling Mangoes up with Novichok nerve agent.
What if this is all a dastardly plot by the Chinese Government to stop us from buying oranges and lemons so that we'll all get scurvy and they can just walk in and steal our stuff? I think that we should watch out for Toyota Hiluxes in Bunnings car parks in case people from ISIS show up, buy a bunch of relatively cheap hardware and then go to Coles. That's not just an eggplant but an eggplant that's hiding a hand grenade.

What if the most sinister threat of all is actually from grannies? I don't know about you but it used to be about baby pictures and pictures of Minions with vaguely amusing captions but now grannies are going into online sewing groups on Facebook, being radicalised online, wanting to do some hard core embroidery and accidentally leaving one needle in one strawberry somewhere in the country.
After all it's grannies who sit on Facebook all day long, liking your photos. It's all a cover so that they can secretly go out at night and conduct missions for MI6, ASIO and the FBI. It is always the ones who you least expect who cause the most damage and who do you suspect less than Mrs Murphy of 37 Pleasant Crescent as she walks through Coles, trying to decide if she wants to put peaches or pears in her fruit pie.

Paris had its attacks in the Bataclan district, London had the 7/7 attacks, New York had the twin towers destroyed on 9/11 but Australia hasn't really had any particularly notable terrorism incidents unless you include the Lindt Café shooting which was declared a terrorist incident so that the insurance company could get out of paying as much, the Hilton Hotel bombing in the rubbish bin in the late 1970s and of course the Emu War.
If you want to make Australians sit upon and take notice, not even locking children up on tropical glulags is enough to make them care. Not even having evil robots at Centrelink sending out letters to other grannies is enough to tear us away from our $22 Avocado Toasts in the morning. We're not even phased all that much by the Knife Festival which takes out Prime Ministers more regularly than the Olympics, or the head of the ABC, unless there's a Four Corners special and a Noir drama series five years after the event. No, if you want to send the Commonwealth Of Australia into six kinds of madness, running around from side to side like brainless sheep, put one needle in a strawberry and then have Karl Stefanovic do some joke piece on Today, about it.

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